A string of southern Ukrainian port cities facing a brutal Russian onslaught guards the fate of not one but two beleaguered nations, according to U.S. and European observers who regard the defenders as a crucial bulwark for Moldova, Ukraine’s closest neighbor near the Black Sea.
A non-NATO country on Ukraine’s southwestern border, Moldova has a population of about 3 million and would be by all accounts powerless to stop the Russian army if it continued its westward advance. While it would represent yet another invasion of a sovereign nation by Russian President Vladimir Putin, there is little reason to think he would be deterred by further international outrage. Complicating matters is the fact that most of the Moldovan-Ukrainian border abuts the pro-Russian, unrecognized breakaway region of Transnistria."There is a very imminent danger, actually, to Moldova," a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. "It’s so important that Ukrainians keep all their positions in that direction."
Such anxieties have festered for months as the Russian military’s mobilization around Ukraine forced trans-Atlantic officials to cast a wary eye on this small state’s strategic location between Ukraine and Romania, a member of NATO on the Black Sea’s western coast. Russia has maintained a military presence within Moldova’s internationally recognized borders since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in defiance of a pledge to withdraw the troops by 2002, and Moldovan officials feel their own fragility in this new era of violence in Europe.
"Is Moldova a target? Is Moldova not a target? We don’t know," Moldovan Ambassador Eugen Caras said in a recent interview at his nation’s embassy in Washington. "The situation is of such nature that nobody thought that Russia would invade, in this way, Ukraine. So now, I think, based on this reality in Ukraine, one cannot rule out anything these days."
The Moldova-Transnistria dispute is practically a model for the controversy that Putin has orchestrated in eastern Ukraine, where he seized territory under the cover of proxy forces in 2014. Putin tried to pressure Ukrainian leaders into negotiating directly with the Russian proxies in Donbas, who call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to be drawn into that process, which was widely perceived as a trap that Russia had first set for Moldovan authorities who had agreed to direct dialogue with the Transnistrians. Putin justified the all-out offensive against the Ukrainian government on the basis that Russia must defend these so-called republics.
An assault involving Moldova could have dramatic military, political, and humanitarian consequences. The country has welcomed more than 330,000 Ukrainian civilians imperiled by the two prongs of the Russian offensive in eastern and southeastern Ukraine, according to international monitors, about 100,000 of whom remain in the country.
Those figures could rise if Russia conquers the important Ukrainian ports that dot the Black Sea coast — an apparent Russian priority that would deprive Ukraine of major economic engines and create a Russian-controlled link between the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, and Russian-seized territory in Donbas.
Yet Russian troops assigned to that offensive drew no easy task. Russian forces reportedly have sustained heavy losses in Mariupol, a major port city not far from the Donbas territory that Russia has controlled since 2014, despite a vicious bombardment that spurred President Joe Biden to denounce Putin as "a war criminal."
Further south and west along the coast, Russian troops succeeded in taking Kherson, but its attacks on Mykolaiv, another city that screens their path to Odessa, have faltered in the face of "a successful counteroffensive" by the embattled Ukrainians, according to new analysis from the Institute for the Study of War.
"So, why are they trying to attack Mykolaiv?" the senior European official said. "To surround Odessa from the north, to take Odessa, and to establish some sort of a permanent sea-plus-land corridor towards Transnistria. And then Moldova would be extremely endangered."
The recent Ukrainian tactical victories around Mykolaiv are hardly the end of the campaign, however, as Russian amphibious assault ships reportedly have been seen in the Black Sea near Odessa. The "heroic cities of Mykolaiv and Kherson," in the words of Odessa’s mayor, have bought the city time, not peace.
"This gave us 21 days to prepare, build barricades, provide food, medicine, and make our city an impregnable fortress," Odessa Mayor Gennadiy Rukhanov told France24.
Odessa has a chance to provide peace for Moldova, according to the senior European official.
"Moldova is categorically well-defended by Ukraine … for now, actually, [as long as the] Ukrainians fight well," the official said.
The humanitarian crisis could worsen more if the Moldovan people find themselves living in a new theater of the war. Moldova is not as important to Putin’s imperialist ambitions as Ukraine, but it has one thing that Ukraine does not — a lightly-defended capital.
"Moldova, with all my [good] sentiment to that country, because I know people from Moldova — these are really good people, very nice people, very peaceful people, you know, but Moldova is really, actually, unprepared for such a kind of aggression," the senior European official said.
Caras, the Moldovan envoy in Washington, acknowledged that his country’s military is a "relatively modest force," even in comparison to their potential adversaries in Transnistria, the breakaway region held by Russian-backed separatists.
"We have roughly 1,500 Russian troops stationed there for many, many years," he said. "Separatists — they have around 6,000 paramilitary personnel. So this is something that one cannot ignore because it’s a solid number of armed people."
Moldovan President Maia Sandu described that Russian force as a "high vulnerability" for her country in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the capital city of Chisinau on March 6, during the second week of the Russian assault on Ukraine.
"Of course, it’s a vulnerability," she said. "We do not have information so far which would confirm the intention for those troops to be involved in some military actions in Ukraine."
Blinken vowed that the United States would support Moldova if Russia attacked.
"You’ve seen the response that we’ve helped to mobilize around the world to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine," he said. "Whenever and wherever that aggression might appear, we will do the same thing."
That support, of course, does not extend to direct military protection. Neither Ukraine nor Moldova is a member of NATO, so the two countries cannot invoke the collective defense provision that would obligate the trans-Atlantic alliance to fend off a Russian attack. Even so, Sandu has not hesitated to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and she has reiterated the Moldovan government’s long-standing demand for "the withdrawal of Russian troops" from Transnistria — a statement not without risks on the edge of a war.
"How do you think actually Russia will perceive that — as an act of neutrality?" the senior European official said, referring to the neutrality pledge in Moldova’s constitution. "If Russia would have a possibility, they would retaliate. I’m pretty convinced about that."
That dynamic renders Moldova as a possible example of the road Ukraine might have traveled, but with ambivalent results. Putin has claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was warranted in part by Ukraine’s long-stalled effort to join NATO. If he has not bombarded Chisinau, neither has he deferred to Moldova’s sovereign government.
"We have told the Russians and the international community on many occasions that one way of Russia respecting our neutrality is withdrawing these troops," Caras told the Washington Examiner.
Moldova attempted to break the impasse more than two decades ago at an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe summit in Istanbul. Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin promised that Russia would withdraw or destroy its military equipment in Transnistria "by the end of 2001" in exchange for Moldova’s "renunciation of the right to receive a temporary deployment" of foreign military forces.
The Istanbul summit took place on Nov. 18-19, 1999 — just a little more than three months after Yeltsin appointed then-FSB Director Vladimir Putin to be his acting prime minister. Their partnership ended quickly, with Yeltsin’s unexpected resignation on Dec. 31, and Yeltsin’s pledge to Moldova went unfulfilled.
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